I am posing this question, not to invite the sort of sterile conflict that Michael I am sure would not allow, but to ask what do we know of the actual current political economy of Iraq?
Even allowing for continued repression of bourgeois democratic rights, it is not credible that the regime is held together purely by terror, and without any ideology that has at least some acceptance among the population. How far does the socialism of the Iraqi Bath party, claim to be relevant and embraced by sections of the population? Is this a national democratic regime? What proportion of property is socially owned? How to capitalists relate to the bureaucracy? How much public support and consultation is elicited to achieve consensus about developments? How are classes and strata organised? How do they organise themselves? How do the religious organisations sit beside the secular organisation?
Presumably most of the published literature is biassed against the regime. What I am looking for are serious references for analyses that are searching and dialectical. Why for example do we not get analyses of the sort that must be available in Iraqi Kurdistan which appears to have a relatively developed civil society, and would include a lot of people seriously interested in following what is happening in Iraq under Saddam?
Particularly if there is skirmishing in the coming weeks about the terms under which Saddam goes into exile, we need to have a dialectical understanding of Iraqi society to be clear which imperialist interventions would most crush any positive socialistic aspects.
Chris Burford London
